I saw laptops like those on hackathons and always sort of assumed they were their personal machines. Kind of surprising to read here that some of those were apparently (company-owned) work laptops.
I work at a large (>50k employees) company that is in every way the opposite of a start-up. Plenty of people cover their work laptops in stickers. The hardware group that handles replacing old machines has a wall of fame for all the lids with cool stickers.